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MONTREAL - Raymond never set out to participate in illegal political financing.

He became a civil engineer because he was obsessed with deconstructing things. He says he daydreamed about being the guy who would oversee a major infrastructure project, maybe a bridge or tunnel, that would make a difference in people’s lives.

But not long after graduating from university, Raymond found that there was a price to pay in order to be a major player in the game. Almost immediately after being hired by one of the province’s largest engineering consulting firms, he was told he’d have to make a donation to a federal political party.

“The deal was I would donate the maximum allowable amount, which is something like $1,200 today, and I’d get the money back from my company in a year-end bonus,” said Raymond, which is not his real name. He spoke on condition of remaining anonymous for fear of jeopardizing his current career.

“Everyone at the company donated — and we donated to more than just one party and we donated often. We donated at the federal, municipal and provincial levels. Our wives donated, the secretaries donated, It was clearly a way to funnel tens of thousands of dollars to a party; it was clearly a way to circumvent electoral law to secure public contracts. It was clearly wrong.”

For decades, Raymond chose to look the other way and, in some cases, to take part in a system where donations were traded for publicly-funded projects to his company — one of nine engineering firms that allegedly colluded to rig the city of Laval’s contract awarding system. He says he regrets having never spoken out about corruption before retiring from the firm in 2009, but insists that being a whistleblower would have cost him his job.

As Quebec continues to delve into the deeply-rooted system of kickbacks, bribes and illegal fundraising that link the province’s construction industry to politicians and civil servants, stories like Raymond’s are becoming increasingly familiar.

Many who testified at the Charbonneau Commission say they didn’t report the instances of wrongdoing they witnessed during their time in politics or construction. Instead, they say they were gradually drawn into the underbelly of Quebec politics, which raises a simple question: how do people become corrupt?

The answer isn’t an easy one, but most experts say it starts with an overall cultural problem.

“What we’re seeing at Charbonneau is what philosophers refer to as a systemic ethical problem,” said Brandiff Caron, who teaches Ethics for Engineering Practice at Concordia University. “What witnesses at the commission are suggesting is that corruption has become part and parcel of the profession of engineering in some cases. If you’re a part of that system it becomes difficult, if not outright impossible, not to do what you know to be wrong. Other than flat-out quitting.”

Caron’s assessment comes just weeks after one Montreal engineering executive admitted to trading cash with Laval’s Parti PRO des Lavallois in return for a guaranteed number of contracts in the early 2000s. Roger Desbois told Judge France Charbonneau that his firm, Aecom-Tecsult, was one of nine companies that paid a two-per-cent kickback on every municipal contract they earned to Parti PRO des Lavallois — which was headed by Laval’s mayor at the time, Gilles Vaillancourt.

“There’s nothing morally complex about participating in bid rigging or illegal kickbacks — it’s just flat-out wrong,” Caron said. “And yet these people were doing it anyway. It hurt the reputation of all engineers, which is sad because there are so many honest ones out there.”

During his testimony, Desbois suggested his years of illegal activity warped his sense of ethics. The former engineer said he repeatedly failed ethics exams given by his company toward the end of his career.

“Corruption becomes a kind of cancer,” said Errol Mendes, who teaches law and ethics at the University of Ottawa. “Maybe it starts with something small and then it begins to spread and, before you know it, you’re doing something that is an outright crime. When you belong to a municipality where corruption becomes the norm, it’s very difficult not to fall into that trap.”

On Monday, former Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum was arrested and charged with corruption, fraud, conspiracy and 12 other charges related to his time as the borough mayor of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

To his allies, Applebaum’s fall from grace came as a complete surprise. After all, here was a man who entered municipal politics to prevent a Snowdon skating rink from being shut down in the early 1990s. But over the course of the following two decades, Applebaum rose through the ranks to be one of the most powerful figures at the Union Montreal party — disbanded this spring after former fundraisers admitted to accepting kickbacks from various local contractors.

“If you look at the Robocalls saga and other scandals, elections in this country are all about pushing the rules as far as they can be pushed,” said Bruce Hicks, who teaches political science at Concordia University. “So for the people who are fundraisers for the party, whose only litmus test is how much money they can raise, there’s a temptation not only to bend the rules but to break them. So at some point, the person asks themselves: ‘What’s the difference between bending the rules and accepting an envelope full of cash?’ Then once you have that cash, why not pay your volunteers, why not just buy votes? It’s a slippery slope.”

Hicks says politicians are particularly vulnerable to corruption because they tend not to be micro-managerial types.

“Politicians are affable people, they’re emotive, they connect with voters,” he said. “They’ll knock on 99 doors while they campaign and everything’s great and then one person yells at them and it ruins their day. These aren’t the kind of people who will take a hard line with their staff, who will look over their shoulders to make sure everything is above board.”

Said Mendes: “The best politicians are people who don’t need the job. If they aren’t beholden to their party, beholden to their fundraisers, if they can just walk away whenever they want, then there’s a much lower chance they’ll just look the other way. Unfortunately, in this era, we’re seeing the rise of the career politician, of people who will do just about anything to hang on to that job.”

Caron says he believes change is possible and he’s encouraged that the provincial government appears committed to educating engineers and other professionals about ethics. But he says the best thing it can do is offer protection to whistleblowers.

“A whistleblower risks so much by putting himself out there,” he said. “So to lose your job, to risk death threats, for an abstract concept may not be good enough. There needs to be protection.”

For Raymond, there’s no undoing what he did during his decades as an engineer. And he’s candid about whether or not he would ever repeat his past mistakes.

“If I’m being honest, it’s tough to say if I wouldn’t just do it all over again,” he said. “It was a question of putting food on the table and getting my hands dirty, or being clean and out of a job.”

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